Extermination-era administrators presented publicly as ordinary, courteous, unremarkable men

Evidence

An Englishman, Stephen H. Roberts, The House that Hitler Built, London, 1939, describes Himmler as “a man of exquisite courtesy and still interested in the simple things of life. He has none of the pose of those Nazis who act as demigods… No man looks less like his job than this police dictator of Germany, and I am convinced that nobody I met in Germany is more normal…” (pp. 89–90)—This reminds one in a curious way of the remark of Stalin’s mother who according to Bolshevik propaganda said of him: “An exemplary son. I wish everybody were like him” (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 656). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2595

Categorization

• XREF: The banality of the perpetrator as ‘normal man’ anticipates Arendt’s later Eichmann thesis and connects to the reader’s scaffolding on how bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion.